With four nights to go before Christmas, RaShelle Harris and her fiance, Brent Kent, cashed their paychecks, dropped off her children and drove up to Thornton for a long evening of gift buying.

It would be their last night together.

They loaded their Saturn with presents — T-shirts and Broncos gear, earrings, a makeup kit for RaShelle’s daughter, a Disney Monopoly game for her son. Heading home to Commerce City, they stopped at a Burger King for a late meal and then headed to a liquor store for a 12-pack. One of Brent’s friends had called with the holiday blues, and he hoped to cheer him up over beers.

On a sweeping curve, RaShelle and another driver approached each other at a combined speed of about 90 miles per hour.

In the darkness, she suddenly saw lights right in front of her. A Ford truck bore down in her lane. Desperately, she swerved left.

The other driver swerved right and smashed into the passenger side of the car. The impact knocked her unconscious.

When she came to, her fiance was making noises, mumbling, not talking.

“Oh, my God, babe. Are you OK?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything. She reached over and grabbed his hand. He clutched hers.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t even see him coming,” she said.

“I love you.”

For a moment, Brent spoke clearly.

“I love you too, babe,” he said.

Those were his final words.

Each year, drunken drivers kill more than 100 people in Colorado, but DUI homicides rarely attract much public attention. The pain is private, suffered by the families of the victims and the driver.

And yet, each of these crashes ripples through society, imposing emotional costs on families and friends, financial costs for investigators and lawyers, doctors and nurses, jurors and judges and jails. One national study put the total costs of alcohol-related crashes at $51 billion in a single year.

This is the story of one such crash, on the night of Dec. 21, 2007, that didn’t make the news.

RaShelle suffered a concussion and a broken neck. Still, she somehow managed to climb out of her wrecked Saturn and walk over to the truck. Its headlights were off, the driver’s seat empty.

She peered into the windshield. Nobody was there.

She passed out again.

When she regained consciousness, she was in a hospital, with no memories of an ambulance ride. It hurt to open her eyes. She could see people only when they stood right over her.

“I kept asking them where Brent was. They kept telling me, he was in surgery, he was in surgery.”

Someone asked whether she had been drinking. She must have reeked of alcohol. The crash had scattered the 12-pack of beer across her car, along with all the Christmas presents.

“No,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

When she met Brent, RaShelle had a daughter and a son. They had just learned they were going to have another child together. She was two months pregnant. They were planning to marry. But where was he?

“Where’s babe, where’s babe, where’s he at?” she kept asking. Nobody at the hospital would give her a straight answer.

Finally her father took her hand.

“RaShelle, it’s not good news,” he said. “Brent passed away.”

“No, you’re wrong!” she cried. “Go check again.”

Brent Kent was 27 years old. He was killed the night after his birthday.

Truck driver liked to drink

The Ford Ranger that smashed into RaShelle’s Saturn was registered to a Brian K. Larson, a 34-year-old man who had never been in criminal trouble, with one exception: drinking and driving.

He had been arrested for drunken driving in 1992 at the age of 18, after he left a party and ran a stoplight. He told an alcohol evaluation specialist he had been drinking a six-pack of beer twice a week since he was 16, for fun at parties. He did not feel alcohol-dependent, however, and did not think his alcohol use posed a problem in his life.

The specialist agreed: “He appears to fit the typical profile of a non-problem social drinker.”

Nine years later, Larson picked up a second offense. He pleaded guilty to driving while ability impaired after a test showed his blood-alcohol content was below the DUI level, and he was sentenced to probation.

Now he was missing from the site of a fatal crash.

Hunt for driver who fled

Scott Kembel’s phone awakened him at 12:15 a.m.

A driver had spotted the wreck on McKay Road and called police. Kembel, a crash investigator at the Thornton Police Department, was on call that week.

By the time paramedics put RaShelle into an ambulance, Kembel was on his way to a crash-scene investigation that would last until dawn.

As the lead investigator, Kembel coordinated the work of a dozen other officers at the scene. The roadway evidence clearly showed that the Ford Ranger had been in the wrong lane. Though the truck swerved to the right at the last moment, “the impact of the crash happened in her lane,” Kembel said. “He had to have been in that lane.”

With still no sign of the driver, canine officer Chris Brown tried to track Larson from the wreckage. Brown began searching the fields west of the crash with his dog, Spike. The night was frigid, and Spike couldn’t pick up a scent. So Brown set off to the address listed for Larson in motor vehicle records, a home 2 miles east of the crash site. It was an old address.

As Brown drove along Brighton Road, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, a man came stumbling out of the fields.

Larson had fled toward his previous home.

“Do you know why I’m looking for you?” Brown asked.

Larson’s reply? “‘Cause of the hit and run I just did?”

Moment alters many lives

Before Christmas, a police officer took RaShelle’s parents to the Saturn. They managed to salvage a somewhat smashed makeup kit and Monopoly game, and RaShelle’s sister bought new presents.

RaShelle could no longer afford the home she and Brent rented together. So she, her daughter and her son moved in with her father and stepmother, who also had children.

Once her baby was born, “there were actually 10 of us,” she said. “The boys bunked up, and the girls bunked up.”

The crash had not harmed the baby growing inside her. But her doctor told her she had narrowly escaped a paralyzing injury, and paralysis could still result if she reinjured her neck.

“I went to the funeral with a neck brace; I came back to work with a neck brace,” she said. “I couldn’t drive. My dad and my stepmom chauffeured me everywhere.”

There were court hearings, seven of them before the trial.

There was another trip to a hospital, where a baby boy was born July 2, 2008. RaShelle wanted to name her son for his father but couldn’t bear saying Brent again and again. So she named him Logan Brent Lee Kent.

In Brian Larson’s prior drinking-and-driving cases, his blood-alcohol content was just above the 0.08 percent DUI level in one instance and just below in the other. He had never been convicted of any other crime.

“This is 17 years of DUIs”

But in his third case, he had killed one person and seriously injured another. He had fled the site of a fatal crash. And his blood-alcohol content, measured about two hours after the crash, was 0.154 percent, nearly twice the legal limit.

Adams County prosecutors decided there would be no plea bargains in this case. “This isn’t an 18-year-old drinking for the first time,” District Attorney Don Quick said. “This is 17 years of DUIs.”

In court, supporters surrounded RaShelle — her family, Brent’s family, friends, a victim’s advocate from Mothers Against Drunk Driving. On the other side, Brian Larson sat with his parents, and once his trial began, his mother and father sat alone.

RaShelle appreciated that the case was “thoroughly investigated, thoroughly thought out,” she said. But “listening to the autopsy report, seeing the scenes, the re-enactment — it was hell. There’s no other way to put it.”

On the witness stand, she recounted the drive home. How excited Brent was “because he wanted to wrap up the presents we had for the kids.” The bright lights suddenly in front of them. Brent’s last words to her.

And then, “I remember lying in bed and I had a brace on my neck, and I kept asking everybody where my babe was. Nobody would answer,” she said.

The jury quickly reached a verdict of guilty on all seven counts — vehicular homicide and vehicular assault, leaving the scene of an accident with death and with injury, careless driving causing death and causing injury, and driving under the influence.

Terry Bunge, a retired social studies teacher and alternate juror, nevertheless wished there had been testimony from witnesses who had seen Brian Larson drinking before the crash.

“That would have taken away any doubt,” he said.

Hearing RaShelle’s testimony and thinking about her baby boy reinforced Bunge’s opinion that society must do more to prevent drunken driving. He would welcome a device that could be put on cars to keep intoxicated people from starting them.

“If there’s anything we can do as a society to keep these people from driving, we should do it. It’s just so tragic, what they do to people and their families,” he said.

Justice in tragedy for all

On Nov. 19, 2008, the families of the victim, the survivor and the convicted driver met in Judge Francis Wasserman’s courtroom for sentencing.

Gloria Larson, Brian’s mother, spoke first.

“This is very hard for me,” she said. “I have been more in court this year than I have in my whole life.”

She described her son as smart, talented and “a very caring person” who was devastated because he had taken another man’s life. “And I am still proud of him, even though he has committed this terrible crime. That is not who Brian really is,” she said.

Brian apologized to RaShelle, to Brent’s family and friends, “and I know that sorry is not good enough,” he said. “You know, I don’t expect their forgiveness. I haven’t forgiven myself, and not a day goes by I don’t think about what I’ve done.”

RaShelle brought her baby boy to court. She talked about his father. “Brent was wild and crazy. He was stubborn and fearless and handsome and brave and loving and honest.”

And “giving birth to my son, while beautiful and sweet, was almost bittersweet,” she said. “It’s been very hard. I look at my son and I know that never will he see his father, he’ll never be held in his arms, he’ll never feel his father’s love the way we have.”

Finally it was Judge Wasserman’s turn.

“I can’t help but think that daily, this court, as every court in the United States does, listens to the pleas of individuals who come before it having been out on the road driving while under the influence of alcohol,” he said.

Invariably he wonders, “is this going to be the next individual who goes out sometime in the future and kills somebody? And that’s become a reality in this case.”

He sentenced Larson to 12 years in prison.

In a criminal courtroom, the families of the victim and the defendant typically sit on opposite sides of the aisle and avoid speaking to each other. Encounters are often tense, sometimes hostile.

But at the end of this trial, prosecutor Rhoda Pilmer noticed something remarkable, “a moment of unbelievable grace.”

RaShelle Harris walked over to greet Brian Larson’s parents — and they embraced.

In a tragedy for both, two families tried to console each other.

“I just looked over at his parents and they looked so, so sad. I was really sorry that they had to live with the mistake their son made,” RaShelle said.

They cried. She cried.

Losses high for all families

In every alcohol-involved crash, there are a host of human and financial costs. If a victim dies, his family loses a lifetime with him, along with all the benefits his work could have brought. There are lost wages, legal and medical expenses, property and vehicle damages, police and paramedic costs, insurance costs, traffic delays.

In 2002, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attempted to total these costs for a single year, 2000. It concluded that alcohol-involved crashes killed 16,792 people, injured 513,000 others and cost $51 billion.

The average cost of a single alcohol-involved fatal crash was $1.1 million, and $1.2 million when a victim was critically injured.

In Adams County, as in counties throughout Colorado, the jails and daily dockets of misdemeanor courts are filled with people facing two types of cases: domestic violence and drunken driving.

Today, Brian Larson is serving his sentence at the Bent County Correctional Facility. He will become eligible for parole in 4 1/2 years. If he serves a full 12-year sentence, Colorado taxpayers will spend more than $360,000 to keep him there.

He declined to be interviewed for this story.

His parents drive four hours to Las Animas in the southeastern corner of Colorado to visit him, then four hours back home. They have grown to know RaShelle’s and Brent’s families since the trial. Last Christmas, they came to dinner with Brent’s family at his grandmother’s house. RaShelle and her baby dropped by.

“It was nice to visit with them,” she said. “The Larsons are very nice people.”

Logan is a healthy toddler now, a boy who looks much like the father he will never meet. “He’s a character,” RaShelle said. At the age of 17 months, he loves to dance and is learning his first words — uh-huh, no-no, mama, grandma, bath. Bath is one of his favorites.

RaShelle is working full time and raising three children. “I know life goes on, but I’ll never forget that night,” she said.

Someday, when Logan is old enough to understand, she will tell him about his father.

“I’ll tell him his dad was an amazing man,” she said. “That we were both very excited to have him. I don’t want anything held from him. I want him to know who his dad was, and what happened. How his dad was taken away.

“I don’t think I’ll ever know why.”

Denver Post research librarian Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
David Olinger: 303-954-1498 or dolinger@denverpost.com

David Olinger is an investigative journalist who has worked for newspapers in New Hampshire, Florida and Colorado since 1976. In 18 years in Colorado, he has covered a variety of subjects for The Denver Post.

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